I rejected wikis long ago. Alternate realities and propaganda are not reality.
Cannibal Island: In 1933, Nearly 5,000 Died In One Of Stalin's Most Horrific Labor Camps
TOMSK, Russia – Every year, a small group of locals travels the 550 kilometers northwest from this Siberian city to Nazinsky Island, in the middle of the Ob River, to place a wreath at the foot of a wooden cross. It is a gesture of remembrance for the victims of the horrific events that unfolded there in the summer of 1933.
"Every year in June, we place a wreath at the cross that was placed on the island in 1993," Valeria Shtatolkin told RFE/RL. "But this year, we couldn't go. The water was too high, and the island is almost entirely flooded."
Their dedication to the pilgrimage is part of an effort to remind fellow Russians of an experiment in social engineering and self-sufficiency that went tragically wrong for many of the "settlers" lured by Soviet authorities under Josef Stalin -- whose brutal excesses have frequently been downplayed under Russia's current leadership in favor of a more forgiving historical interpretation of Stalin's three-decade rule.
Eighty-five years ago in May, a small flotilla of lumber barges pulled up to Nazinsky Island and off-loaded about 3,000 "settlers" with orders to construct a "special settlement," as their little corner of Stalin's GULAG – the network of labor camps that spread across the Soviet Union where millions of people were repressed and killed -- was euphemistically called. At least 23 of the prisoners were already dead.
Without tools or shelter or food and surrounded by armed guards who shot anyone who tried to brave the icy river, the prisoners quickly fell victim to starvation, disease, violence, and the brutal elements. And still, additional barges continued to pull up at the island.
Numerous gruesome incidents of cannibalism were reported. So many, in fact, that locals came to call it Cannibal Island or the Island of Death.
By August, at least 4,000 people were dead or missing. According to a Soviet document dated August 20, 1933, there were only 2,200 survivors out of the 6,700 prisoners who had been sent to Nazinsky, a low-lying, swampy strip some 3 kilometers long and about 600 meters wide.
Only 300 of those survivors were deemed at the time fit for further work.
"Once a woman from the Island of Death was brought to our house," Feofila Bylina, a resident of the village of Nazino on the north bank of the Ob, recalled in an oral history in 1989. "She was being taken to another camp.... The woman was taken into the back room to spend the night and I saw that her calves had been cut off. I asked and she said, 'They did that to me on the Island of Death – cut them off and cooked them.' All the meat on her calves was cut away. Her legs were freezing because of this and she wrapped them up with rags. She was able to move on her own. She looked like an old woman, but really she was just a little over 40."
The Nazinsky tragedy was the product of pitiless Soviet efficiency.
